I Have Some Questions for You
The second season of The White Lotus created so much buzz late last year, yet nothing I read seemed to point to how the entire show was underpinned by themes of “gaslighting” — how others convince us something is true and maybe more importantly, how we convince *ourselves* that something is true. (Maybe this analysis is out there and I missed it?) Characters continually wonder: Is my partner having an affair? Is this person attracted to me? And — zinger — is this cabal of “high-class gays” (to borrow Tanya’s phrasing) trying to kill me? Or…does the “evidence” just overwhelmingly tell me so, ergo it’s true? I thought this last season was brilliant.
So it goes with Rebecca Makkai’s latest, I Have Some Questions for You. The general plot puts one’s “thriller” antennae up as Bodie, an alum of a New Hampshire boarding school turned famous podcaster, returns to teach a class to students and ends up revisiting a murder that took place during her senior year with current students, now a generation removed. Was the person who was found guilty *actually* guilty? True crime podcasters, one particularly obsessive true crime YouTuber, plus legions of Reddit contributors have been on the case, and now Bodie and her students are too.
What happens when our teenage obsessions (i.e. classmates, school traditions, Kurt Cobain [as is the case here]) linger in one’s psyche to create a “scene” that colors your memory of everything that happened your senior year…including a murder of a female classmate? Turns out that sometimes it’s hard to parse what’s the “truth” and what “feels really, really plausible based on multiple threads.” Although this is most certainly a #MeToo novel, I Have Some Questions for You raises constructive, um, ~questions~ about how people learn, deduce, debate, and pronounce. What better setting than a school, a place where (we hope) good “question-asking” is valued.
{Am I the only one read who read Tanya’s demise in The White Lotus in this way? Like, yes, tons of “evidence,” but do we reaaally know this was what was going to transpire, or did the clues just overwhelmingly point there and so she convinced herself that it was so?}
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